Global Spin’s weekly guide to five rental movies that will bring you up to speed with with the past week’s global events. Compiled by Tony Karon and Ishaan Tharoor.
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Citizen Kane
Charles Foster Kane, the rapacious media baron relentlessly acquiring assets and starting wars …
Officials in Maiduguri, Nigeria’s seventh largest city and capital of northeastern Borno State, banned motorbikes earlier this week in a bid to curb militant activities borne on the backs of these ubiquitous vehicles.
Yet even though nearly 7,000 innocent Nigerians have now found their livelihoods on the wrong side of the law, the …
It was the kind of tip-off that Andy Coulson would have appreciated in his days at the News of the World. As news broke that the title was to close, a source told the Guardian that the former editor of the tabloid was to be arrested by police investigating allegations of hacking and reports that the News of the World made hefty—and …
The verdict, it seems, is already in. Many are already calling South Sudan, which will become the world’s 193rd nation on July 9, a soon-to-be failed state. Indeed, the prognosis is grim: as its secession from Sudan has drawn near, nearly 2000 people in the south have been killed in inter-militia fighting. Hundreds more are dead …
Karl Marx’s 19th century political journalism holds up a lot better than do his general theories of capitalism, socialism and history. Indeed, the father of modern communism may well have nailed the nature of the 2011 revolution in Egypt in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a tract written by the German in 1852. And Friday’s …
Abdul Qadeer Khan is tired of being a scapegoat. The controversial father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb shared hi-tech secrets and equipment with a host of rogue regimes — including North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya — earning himself international notoriety and a 2005 TIME magazine cover that dubbed him “the Merchant of …
It’s big (and overdue) news this week that Mexico City and Washington have finally come to an agreement that lets Mexican truckers ferry their freight into the U.S. But Damien Cave’s excellent and provocative New York Times article about the decline of illegal Mexican immigration into the U.S., which ran on the front page yesterday, …
197 mostly Somali migrants died when their overladen boat capsized in the Red Sea. Escaping a world desperately short of water, they met their end by drowning.
That sad irony underscores the collective misfortune of those enveloped by the worst ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world: they were fleeing the parched Horn of Africa, …
UPDATE: Andy Coulson, former communications director for British Prime Minister David Cameron, is to be arrested Friday over his alleged involvement in the hacking of mobile phones while editor of the News of the World, according to the Guardian.
The end, when it came, was quick and brutal—not unlike the punchy stories about the …
Of the many fruits born of the Arab Spring, is any more exotic than the protest unfolding at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport this week? In what Palestinian organizers describe as a kind of sidelong challenge to Israeli control of access to the occupied territories, activists are arriving at the airport, standing in line at …
As the battle between New York prosecutors and Dominique Strauss-Kahn continues to disintegrate into what increasingly looks like a legal paintball war using bazookas and rotten fruit (seemingly paralyzing hits of semi-gelatinous melon and fungoid kumquat being regularly scored by both sides), the French are taking closer look at the …
In a scathing commentary on the folly of the Obama Administration relying on Dennis Ross to resuscitate Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar notes that Ross has been at the center of just about every failed initiative on that front over the past two decades — and that now, as ever, he is running …
On June 14, the British television network Channel 4 broadcast a stunning hour-long documentary presenting footage of horrific abuses allegedly committed by Sri Lankan troops during the last months of the country’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The images are graphic and profoundly disturbing. They include the …
